Euclid Update – Revised Timeline
In a post last week I hinted that I hoped soon to be able to provide an update on progress with the European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission. People within the Euclid Consortium have known for some time, but it has now been officially announced by ESA, that the timeline for the first full Data Release (DR1; originally scheduled for October 2026) has now been revised.
The plan now is for DR1 to happen in stages, with a first tranche to occur in November 2026 (precise date yet to be announced). The complete data release will take place in mid-2027 (probably in June). The sky area covered by DR1 will be about covering a large sky area of about 1900 deg².
To give a little more background, the data products from the Euclid survey are divided into three levels of data processing function:
- LE1 – the “raw” data frames, prior to calibration, generated at the Science Operations Centre from the time-ordered data and telemetry received from the spacecraft
- LE2 – the calibrated and corrected data for the two instruments (VIS and NISP) – images, spectra, catalogues of point sources, etc
- LE3 – the high-level data products (galaxy catalogues, cosmic shear maps, etc) designed for cosmological analysis
The first release will comprise LE1 and LE2 only. This will be called DR-Foundation. The LE3 data will be added next year to make the full DR1. Since LE3 is required for the cosmological analysis that is the prime motivation for the Euclid mission, it follows that there will be no official cosmology results from Euclid DR1 until mid-2027 at the earliest. Other results based on “Foundation” data may of course emerge before then.
I hope this clarifies the situation.
P.S. Irish physicists and astronomers will be particularly interested to know that the LE1 data includes information about the spacecraft and instrument pointing orientations, which is stored in the form of quaternions…
In the Dark 
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